Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!att!chinet!les From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS Message-ID: <7482@chinet.chi.il.us> Date: 19 Jan 89 17:48:17 GMT References: <9018@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <7387@chinet.chi.il.us> <437@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> <340@moriaMoria.Sp.Unisys.Com> <247@bnr-fos.UUCP> Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix Lines: 24 In article hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes: >I'm currently running on a diskless Sun 3/50. All of my files (and >swapping) are done via NFS. As far as I can tell, the machine is >still Unix. I think when people say that RFS follows "Unix semantics" >more than NFS, they mean one or both of: > - if you open /dev/tty1 on another machine over RFS and cat to it, > it comes out on the remote machine's tty1. If you do this > under Sun's NFS, it comes out of tty1 on your own machine. I haven't seen a diskless RFS implemementation - normally the remote disk has a mount point somewhere under a local "/". If I mount "/" from mach2 as /mach2 on mach1, then /dev/tty1 is on the local mach1, /mach2/dev/tty1 is on the remote mach2. Non-RFS disk mounts on the remote below the RFS mount are followed (although df only reports free space in the partition of the remote end of the mount point) so in the above example you could access /mach2/usr/xxx even if /usr is another disk on mach2. Is this true for NFS? > - the NFS protocol itself doesn't include file locking. However > Sun has a related protocol that does do locking. How about atomic file creation, append mode, or FIFO's? Les Mikesell